Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of ore separation by specific gravity of 10.0 plus, riffle (teeth and valley) manufacturing; and more particularly to a 3D printing method for making a gold separation pad having teeth, riffles, valleys, and creating at least a portion with a negative draft riffle or teeth angle being less than 90 deg. for capture of gold, critical and stategic rare earths and preciouse metals.
Background of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of ore separation machines, and specifically to a system and method for ore separation riffle pad manufacturing used by gold miners. Referring to U.S. Pat. No. 4,517,079, which is herein incorporated by reference, it teaches of a typical round ore separator or concentrator design. Past production/commercial ore separation systems do not work efficiently, fall apart too soon, and are difficult to make.
Most ore concentrators embodiments for this argument have a round body. The round bodies have either had a flat back like the hybrid rotary tables from the 1950's to date, or have had any shape of degree to the concave that were not correct for the riffles equaling no negative draft. Also, to actually work 100% efficiently, the riffles could not be made of a rigid or square design (90°) or more, which do not have any negative draft. They did not work for a commercial mine production setting with successfully expected results. They did work 10% to 20% for a weekend miner hobbyist on wheels less than 25″ in diameter. Here is the difference between no negative draft and negative draft.
The purpose of this present invention is to teach a new method of making such ore separator pads. Specifically, during the last decade, 3D printers have become common tools for producing 3D physical objects from digital data, such as computer-aided design (CAD) models and animation models. As a consequence, the use of rapid prototyping is now becoming more common in many domains. In particular, architects can greatly benefit from 3D printing. They can produce accurate 3D architectural objects within a few hours instead of days or even months. These prototypes enable a. natural mechanism for repeated reevaluation of architectural projects during their progress, and in particular the detection of difficulties at early stages. Nowadays, 3D printing can be optimized for speed, low cost, and ease-of-use, making it suitable for inspection during the conceptual stages of engineering design when accuracy and mechanical strength of prototypes are important.
Many well-known firms, such as the international “Z Corporation®”, “Object Technologies®”, and “3D Systems®®” companies, and the “Stratasys®” company, located in the United States, manufacture devices that produce 3D physical objects. These various devices are based on several different competing technologies. Evidently, 3D printers produced by different manufacturers, and also different models produced by the same manufacturer, pose different characteristics; they operate differently, and usually, are constrained to different restrictions. However, in one embodiment, many 3D printers, are based on additive manufacturing technology, which transforms the model to be fabricated into relatively thin horizontal cross-sections, and then creates successive layers, etc. until the fabrication is complete. One of the differences between various 3D printers is the way layers are built to create portions of a 3D model to be printed. it should be noted that resolution is usually given in layer thickness, and the XY-resolution is given in dots per inch (DPI). It should be noted that the layer thickness is usually approximately a hundredth of a micrometer (0.1 mm), while XY-resolution is comparable to that of laser printers. The particles (3D dots) are approximately from a fiftieth to a hundredth of a micrometer (0.05 mm-0.1 mm) in diameter.
Conventional 3D printers may also produce correct 3D physical objects only when fed with valid printable models. Such models are represented as polygonal meshes, for example, in the STL (Stereolithography) file-format. A valid model represented as a. polygonal mesh comprises a polygon-soup (an arbitrary set of polygons) that represents a closed 2D-manifold, i.e., a watertight object with substantially no artifacts, such as self-intersections, or a collection of closed 2D-manifolds that substantially do not intersect each other. A valid printable model satisfies additional requirements imposed by various printing devices (different 3D printing devices impose different requirements, as they are based on different technologies).
It should be noted that correct and consistent representations of 3D objects are required by conventional applications, such as modeling, simulation, visualization, CAD (Computer-Aided Design), CAM (Computer-Aided Manufa.cturing), finite element analysis, and the like.
Accordingly, various prior arts have disclosed such related inventions, whereby the provided following patents are herein incorporated by reference for their supportive teachings and enablement criteria for the technology needed to enable one skilled in the art to make and use the subject invention, in which:
U.S. Pat. No 1,081,421, issued Dec. 16, 1913, and discloses an ore concentrating machine.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,267,036, issued May 12, 1981, discloses an apparatus and method for separating free metal from ore.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,389,308, issued Jun. 21, 1983, teaches of an apparatus for separating ores.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,406,783, issued Sep. 27, 1983, teaches of an apparatus for separating ores.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,517,079, issued May 14, 1985, discloses an ore separation system.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,476,014, issued October 1984, discloses a method of making an ore concentrator, and concentrator thus made.
U.S. Pat. No. 94,522,711, issued: Jun. 11, 1985 discloses an ore separation system.
US. Patent app. No.: 2015/0165675, pub. Data: Jun. 18, 2015, discloses a 3D printing.
US. Patent app. No.: 2014/0311651, published: Oct. 23, 2014, discloses a 3D offset printing.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,943,235, issued Aug. 24, 1999, discloses a rapid prototyping system and method with supporting region data processing.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,749,414, issued Jun. 15, 2004, discloses extrusion apparatus for three-dimensional modeling.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,339,974, issued May 17, 2016, discloses application of additive manufacturing processes to efficiently achieve higher levels of hardware integration.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,533449, issued: Jan. 3, 2017, discloses material deposition systems with four or more axes.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,656,423, issued May 23, 2017, discloses a device and method for producing three-dimensional models.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,669,586, issued Jun. 6, 2017, discloses a material dispensing system.
Despite the various teachings of the incorporated references provided above, none of the art taken singly or in combination is believed to teach the following invention. In particular, there is a need for making ore concentrator pads with teeth and valleys (riffles) shaped so that at least a portion form a negative draft or angles being less than 90 degrees. Up to this time, there has not been an easy, fast, accurate, or inexpensive method of making a negative draft ore concentrator pad.